Kartik Maini is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago. They took their B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of Delhi. Maini's doctoral project is situated at the intersections of intellectual history, religious studies, and postcolonial thought, and in a multilingual archive comprising Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil sources. They are interested in histories of askēsis/asceticism, renunciant subcultures, and the possibilities of anticolonial critique lodged therein.